The more we know the more we notice.

Cumulus Fractus

Clouds this afternoon are cumulus fractus – the kind of cumulus you get at the end of a storm — ragged-edged, wispy, and scooped out, though still mostly bright and white. They are low, probably no more than a mile high, separated by large amounts of clear blue sky. They don’t look like cauliflower or sheep or popcorn, nor do they have the flat bases of new cumulus, so the average form could be turned upside-down without looking strange. Indeed, these are the types of clouds that look like bears and dragons and roosters – I definitely saw a rooster today — and all sorts of things. Once they were puffy cumulus, but now they are breaking up and evaporating.

Even so, they are much bigger than they seem. Stretch out your thumb and see how well it covers a large house from the distance of half a mile. Or, if your location doesn’t let you see houses that far away, try choosing a water tower and a place in town where you can view it from something between a half -mile and a mile away. Stretch out your arm and see how well your thumb covers the water dome. Compare that with how much of the nearest overhead cloud you can cover in the same way. Clouds on the horizon are just as large, of course. This exercise will help you to rightly perceive the sizes of cumulus fractus clouds any time you see them.